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Today, “The 700 Club” ran a report about how “modesty is hot,” specifically profiling the work of the groups Secret Keeper Girl and Modest Is Hottest, whose founder does workshops on how girls can avoid looking like a “hoochie momma momma.” While the main theme of the story was the sexualization of women in the fashion industry and youth culture, the groups also told young women that the best way to entice men is with modest dress.

Tea Party Update, a conservative “news” outlet whose mission is to “further the cause of the Tea Party, convert more people to our cause,” and elect “liberty-minded Tea Party candidates,” emailed members today with a sponsored message from CompleteSurvivalSystem.com.

As you can imagine, the email, entitled “Your Guns Will Be Seized,” was just a tad over the top, asking members what they will do “when the government barges into your home and seizes your guns TOMORROW,” or when “FEMA tries to cram you into one of their camps like sardines.”

Sandy Rios told listeners of her radio show yesterday that President Obama is “no friend to Israel,” and even went so far as to suggest that the president is trying to cut off aid to the country while “sending aid to their enemies, the people they are fighting.”

While speaking with conservative writer Sarah Stern, Rios insisted that Obama wants “no aid to Israel, just aid to Hamas.”

Rios, of course, is brazenly misleading her audience, as Israel currently receives more U.S. aid than any other country, far outstripping even nations like Afghanistan.

The Obama administration heavilyfunded Israel’s Iron Dome, and the magazine Foreign Policy noted that aid to Israel has increased under Obama’s presidency:

The case for Obama's Israel policy begins with record-high levels of Foreign Military Financing (FMF). The Obama administration has increased security assistance to Israel every single year since the president took office, providing nearly $10 billion in aid -- covering roughly a fifth of Israel's defense budget -- over the past three years. To put this in perspective, this is about 20 percent higher than the remaining six dozen recipients of U.S. FMF combined. Historic aid levels have been complemented by other steps to ensure Israel's unrivaled military advantage in the region, including high-level consultation with Israeli officials on U.S. arms sales to the region, operational cooperation to improve Israel's conventional military and counterterrorism capabilities, and providing Israel with advanced technology, such as the fifth-generation stealth Joint Strike Fighter, to which no other state in the Middle East has access.

Under Obama's direction, the United States has also deepened defense cooperation aimed at helping Israel address its most pressing security concerns, including rocket and missile threats emanating from the Gaza Strip, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. When then-Senator Obama traveled to Israel in 2008, it wasn't for a political fundraiser. Instead, he visited Israeli victims of Palestinian rocket fire in the southern town of Sderot, declaring "I came to Sderot with a commitment to Israel's security." These were not just words. As president, Obama has championed efforts to provide Israel with $275 million over and above its annual FMF to help finance Iron Dome, an anti-rocket system that has already saved Israeli lives by intercepting approximately 90 percent of projectiles launched against protected areas in the country's south in the past year.

In yet another case of Todd Starnes beingaterriblereporter, the Fox News commentator said in a radio bulletin yesterday that the University of Wisconsin-Madison is going to begin factoring a student’s race into its grading system.

Starnes misrepresents the language, which dates back to 2009, of a stated university goal to see an improvement in the grades of students from “historically underrepresented racial-ethnic groups,” mangling it to suggest that the university would actually require professors to begin “adjusting the grades” of students based on their race. In other words, the school sees higher grades “as an outcome” of fostering diversity in academics, not as a mandated result.

“At face value, the University of Wisconsin seems to be sacrificing academic education on the altar of academic diversity. Whatever happened to giving kids the grades they deserved?” Starnes asked.

Good question! Maybe Starnes could use some of the journalism skills he learned in school to do some basic research — like a Google search — to see if his reporting holds water.

In an interview with the Tea Party News Network earlier this month, anti-immigrant activist William Gheen warned that undocumented immigrants are more dangerous than “anything that Al Qaeda could blow up, short of a nuclear detonation.”

Speaking with TPNN host Larry Altman on July 8, Gheen said that undocumented immigrants would “displace millions of American workers, cost untold Americans their lives, cost untold Americans their families and their homes and their mortgage payments” and warned that American children will be turned away from college “because invaders have been brought in the country and put in those seats ahead of” them.

Gheen said he was especially concerned about undocumented immigrants “coming from China,” possibly a reference to his theory that China will recruit immigrants to fight America from within.

Altman: Thousands of illegals crossing our border with basically no control. How many might be affiliated with maybe Al Qaeda, as an example?

Gheen: Well, what the illegals that are coming — and especially the ones that are coming from China — are going to do to America are much more powerful and lasting impacts than anything that Al Qaeda could blow up, short of a nuclear detonation.

You’re talking about millions of people that are going to displace millions of American workers, cost untold Americans their lives, cost untold Americans their families and their homes and their mortgage payments. Hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer resources. And how do you put a price tag on a family, let’s say that’s been in the United States for 300 years, and four or five different members of that family have gone off to World War II and Korea and maybe World War I to fight for the American way of life, and then finally they get to their grandson that’s alive in the year 2020 that doesn’t get to go to the college of his choice because invaders have been brought in the country and put in those seats ahead of him. That child’s life, that negatively impacts that child’s ability to self-actualize, to be all they can be, impacted because the future has been stolen by this usurpation, this treason, this treachery from the highest levels of our own government right here in the United States of America.

It is beyond the pale, it is outlandish, but it is a type of weapon from which the American people can never recover. Once they get enough people in here to get the boat really sinking, and then they get the borders destroyed and they start taking up all the guns and we’ve got wave after wave of future illegal immigrants pouring in and pouring in, the existing stock of Americans are going to be so politically and economically buried under this wave, that it’s a weapon from which we can never recover.

Truth in Action Ministries, a purveyor of incendiary “documentaries” that explore our country’s apparent slide into anti-Christianmoralturpitude, is back to warn us that Christians are now an increasingly persecuted minority in America.

Hosted by conservative activists Jerry Newcombe and John Rabe, the group’s most recent film, “We the People: Under Attack,” is a field guide to how “activist judges” are restricting religious liberties and the freedom of speech, and includes appearances from right-wing figures such as Herb Titus, Phyllis Schlafly, Carrie Severino and Alan Sears.

The subject of scorn in “We the People” is the federal judiciary, seen as a rogue branch of government with a revisionist interpretation of the Constitution. Newcombe warns that “our country is under attack by activist judges, including some on our nation’s Supreme Court.”

The separation of church and state is framed as both a slap in the face to Christians and a subversion of the will of our Founding Fathers, and Titus laments that the U.S. government doesn’t strictly adhere to the Ten Commandments and the Bible in its public policy. Rabe breathlessly reports that “in recent decades, the federal judiciary has instituted abortion on demand, overturned limits on partial-birth abortion, silenced voluntary prayer in schools and discovered a so-called ‘right to sodomy’ in the constitution.”

Newcombe argues that recent decisions by the Supreme Court defy the Constitution’s purportedly religious themes, and relays this quote by Thomas Jefferson to prove that even he believed in mixing religion with government:

No nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man, and I as chief magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example.

One slight caveat, however: this quote appears absolutely nowhere in any of Jefferson’s writings or records of his speeches, and first materialized in 1857, decades after Jefferson died. Looks like Newcombe will have to find more fake quotes from the nation’s founders to prove his point.

WorldNetDaily columnist Lord Christopher Monckton knows that Americans would rise up and demand President Obama’s imprisonment if only they knew the truth about “the genuineness of the ‘birth certificate.’” They would know this, he argues, if only the “Marxstream news media” (that’s a new one) would stop suppressing the findings of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s conspiracy-theory-driven “cold case posse.”

Monckton writes today in WND that the findings of Arpaio’s “investigation” into Obama’s birth certificate received “virtually no major news coverage,” thus letting Obama off the hook and suppressing the great work of “tea party citizens.”

He goes on to link media coverage of the birther conspiracy theory to reports about climate change: “[T]he voters are not given a fair selection of the facts on the climate, on the ‘birth certificate’ or on many other subjects where the ‘liberal’ majority in the news media simply refuses to keep them briefed. Herein lies a grave danger to democracy.”

It seems voters will miss out on Arpaio’s damning investigation, “unless they had been fortunate enough to read WND.”

Joe Arpaio, sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, is portrayed by the Marxstream news media as being nothing more than a redneck Republican with a thirst for self-publicity. This catastrophic misrepresentation may yet come back to bite them.

…

When 250 tea party citizens approached him with their concerns about the genuineness of the “birth certificate,” he told them he did not want to get involved in a political squabble. When they persisted, he said he would refer the “birth certificate” to his cold-case posse. The posse, after some weeks, reported that they were themselves unhappy with the document and wanted to investigate further.

Six months later, he went public and said there was probable cause to suggest the White House document was a forgery. Yet his press conference, apart from a very brief item on CNN, got virtually no major news coverage.

However, neither he nor his posse have given in. They have had insufficient support from the state’s attorney general, who seems to prefer a quiet life. Any AG worth his salt would by now have gone straight to the federal district court and asked for orders requiring the state of Hawaii to hand over the original “birth certificate” and related documents for forensic examination. There is more than enough evidence to justify such an application, but the AG sits comfortably in his air-conditioned office and looks the other way.

…

In this respect, the debate about the “birth certificate” is similar to the debate about the climate. As with the “birth certificate,” so with the climate, the left have sullenly adopted a preconceived notion, and since they overwhelmingly control the news media, they are unwilling to allow any fact to be published if that fact runs counter to the Party Line.

So the voters are not given a fair selection of the facts on the climate, on the “birth certificate” or on many other subjects where the “liberal” majority in the news media simply refuses to keep them briefed. Herein lies a grave danger to democracy. For if the news media, whatever their opinion, will not report the facts on both sides of a question, how can the voters obtain enough information to reach a fair decision on the basis of the evidence?

That is one of many reasons why I hope that Sheriff Joe will persist in his investigation until he leaves the attorney general of Arizona no option but to do the right thing. If Sheriff Joe eventually succeeds in proving before a jury that the “birth certificate” is a forgery, the voters will rightly be furious that – unless they had been fortunate enough to read WND – they had not previously been given any of the key facts behind the investigation. Then, perhaps, they will realize that news media controlled by the left can no longer be trusted. They will cease to subscribe to those media that have become most clearly prejudiced. And, by withdrawing their custom, they will drive those media out of business.

If sunlight is the best disinfectant, our system of funding elections could use a whole lot more of it. This morning a Senate committee is holding a hearing on the DISCLOSE Act and the need for increased transparency surrounding money in federal elections.

Disclosure of political spending is key to the functioning of a democracy, allowing voters to understand who is behind political information and what the funder’s agenda may be. Even in the Supreme Court’s damaging Citizens United decision that opened the door to unlimited corporate political spending, eight of the nine justices supported disclosure laws.

Unfortunately, as Rep. Chris Van Hollen recently noted in an op-ed, “the floodgates were opened to outside spending, but the disclosure has yet to follow.” He wrote:

At the time, many were concerned that corporations would be pressured to open up their corporate coffers for the purpose of making political expenditures but would prefer to do so anonymously to avoid the backlash from their customers or shareholders. Four years later, in light of experiencing the two most expensive elections in history since the decision, it appears that these fears were well-founded. Outside money has poured into campaigns and it has done so under the cover of darkness, as a cottage industry has emerged to funnel money from corporations and others, into federal elections through non-profit groups that are not required to disclose their donors.

The current influx of dark money into our democracy threatens the integrity of our political system, and Americans know it. Click on our graphic below below to share it on Facebook and show your support for increased transparency of political money:

In a campaign ad that began airing last week in Arizona, Republican gubernatorial candidate Andrew Thomas boasts of having “stood up to the gay lobby” and promises to stop undocumented immigrants “before it’s too late.”

“When I enforced the law, illegal immigrants fled this state. Now they stay and protest” Thomas, a former Maricopa County attorney, says in the ad, as he’s flanked by a mostly-white crowd.

Thomas was disbarred in 2012 after facing corruption charges. He isn’t considered a frontrunner in a large Republican field that includes executive Christine Jones, State Treasurer Doug Ducey, Secretary of State Ken Bennett, former Rep. Frank Riggs, and others.

Two candidates with sterling Religious Right credentials won runoff primary elections yesterday to become GOP nominees to the U.S. House in Georgia.

Jody Hice won a primary to succeed Rep. Paul Broun in Georgia’s 10th District, and seems prepared to pick up Broun’s mantle as one of the most far-right members of Congress.

In 2012, Hice wrote a book in which he claimed that gay people have launched a scheme to “sodomize” children and proposed that Muslims be denied First Amendment rights.

Hice, a Baptist pastor, also hosts a syndicated radio show in which he has compared homosexuality to alcoholism and lamented that it “enslaves” people “in a lifestyle that frankly they are not”; blamed school shootings on the end of government-sponsored school prayer; and speculated about the prophetic qualities of “blood moons.”

Hice, who made his name advocating for copies of the Ten Commandments to be displayed in government buildings, once told a newspaper reporter that a woman should be free to run for public office….as long as she stays “within the authority of her husband.”

And just last week, Hice suggested that the crisis of refugee children at the southern border might need to be dealt with through “Second Amendment” means.

Richard Land, the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s policy arm, is sick and tired of liberal public school propaganda about slavery in colonial America and the early United States. Subbing for Family Research Council president Tony Perkins on yesterday’s “Washington Watch” radio show, Land told listeners that Americans “ended slavery, we didn’t bring slavery to North America.”

He added that Native Americans were “enslaving each other before we got there.” While it is the case that some Native American groups did engage in various forms of slavery, there is no parallel between that and the vast scale of the American slavocracy.

Land, who left his position at the SBC after making (plagiarized) racial comments regarding the Trayvon Martin case, said that people should watch Dinesh D’Souza’s new movie rather than believe their public school education.

Movies and books like Dinesh D’Souza’s book ‘America’ are so important because if you are younger than forty and you’ve been taught in the public schools, you have not learned the real story of America. You have been taught a lie about America as a colonial power, as a rapacious power. As Dinesh points out, we ended slavery, we didn’t bring slavery to North America. Slavery was there, the Native Americans were enslaving each other before we got here. Eventually, we ended slavery. We have been a civilizing influence in the world.

This year, Kobach is implementing for the first time a law that he encouraged the state legislature to pass in 2011 that requires Kansans to present one of a narrow set of proof-of-citizenship documents (such as a birth certificate or naturalization certificate) in order to register to vote.

Last weekend, Kobach and Morgan held a debate, at which Kobach once again repeated his philosophy that if 19,000 Kansans aren’t finished with his byzantine voter-registration process, it’s just because they’re procrastinators who don’t care enough to vote anyway.

“They aren’t being prevented from anything,” he said of the 19,000 people whose voter registrations are on hold. “They’re simply not yet completing the process.”

As we’re dealing with the refugee crisis on the southern border, right-wing elected officials have amped up their inappropriate, inflammatory rhetoric to dehumanize immigrants and attack immigration reform:

Rep. Louie Gohmert claims children being held are a problem because “we don’t even know what all diseases they have” and added that our healthcare system “can’t withstand the influx,” which, he believes was orchestrated by President Obama to recruit millions of people to cast fraudulent ballots for Democrats.

Sen. David Vitter has “had it with undocumented immigrants,” and tweeted on Friday that “enough is enough.” To deal with the crisis, he introduced a bill that would “require mandatory detention for anyone” that is in the U.S. illegally, in order to get “illegal aliens on the next plane home.” (Mother Jones calculated that this effort would require more than 64,000 planes to actually work.)

Rep. Tom Tancredo shared a similar plan when he said that President Obama should “sign an executive order saying all these people ought to be returned. Put them on buses or planes, send them back to the countries from which they came and have the governments there take care of it.”

Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona, claimed that these unaccompanied minors from Central America are probably “gangbangers” and questioned why they are being sent to this county in the first place.

Of course, elected extremists aren’t the only ones making outrageous statements:

The Minuteman Project’s Jim Gilchrist said this crisis is “part of a concerted effort to transfer populations of Central America and Mexico into the United States using minor children, illegal immigrants under the age of 18, as human shields… to detour our ability to enforce our immigration laws.”

The American Family Association’s Sandy Rios suggested the child refugees should be quarantined like lepers used to be, harking back to “biblical times” when the “lepers were separated” because it was “understood that leprosy was so contagious.” Rios' fretted that these children are transported in the “same planes that you and I fly in… How do we know about lice and disease before they get on public transportation?”

Jody Hice, running to replace Georgia Rep. Paul Broun in the U.S. House, suggested that people take up arms in response to “a government that refuses to secure our borders” because “that is the reason we have a Second Amendment.”

The Right Wing's inflammatory rhetoric distorts the reality of the crisis, causing more conflict and damage.

There’s a reason so many Republican politicians seem to bring a religious fervor to their efforts to gut public institutions and social welfare spending. The modern day Religious Right draws much of its ideology from Christian Reconstructionists who teach that God gave specific duties to the government, the church, and the family.

According to this theological worldview, education and taking care of the poor are the responsibility of families and churches, and it is unbiblical for the government to take on these roles. That meshes well with the view of “constitutional conservatives” who believe, for example, the Constitution does not authorize any federal government role in education.

A stark example of the increasingly indistinct line between conservative Republicans and hard-core Christian Reconstructionists and dominionists (who believe the right kind of Christians are meant to have dominion over every aspect of society) can be found in the recent Republican primary victory of Michael Petrouka in a race for a county council seat in an Anne Arundel County, Maryland. Peroutka believes that any law that runs counter to God’s law is invalid, and that the Maryland General Assembly is itself no longer a valid legislative body. Here’s a concise summation of his approach to government:

Since civil government is ordained by God in order to protect God-given rights, then the function of civil government is to obey God and to enforce God’s law – PERIOD.

It is not the role of civil government to house, feed, clothe, educate or give heath care to…ANYBODY!

This religion-inflected ideological view of government is not relegated to inhabitants of the far-right fringe like Peroutka. David Barton, an influential Republican activist and “historian” who helped write the GOP’s national platform in 2012, claims that the Constitution was drawn directly from the Bible and the sermons of colonial preachers, and that its focus on individual freedom reflects the founders’ theology of individual salvation. In this view, the Tea Party’s belief in a radically limited federal government is not only a question of constitutional interpretation, it is a mandate of Holy Scripture.

Just this month, Barton promoted these views on “Praise the Lord,” the flagship program of the Trinity Broadcasting Network, which bills itself as the world’s largest religious network and America’s most-watched faith channel. “In the Bible, Jesus has a teaching about minimum wage,” Barton said. “In the Bible, Jesus has two teachings on capital gains tax.” The Bible, according to Barton, opposes those taxes as well as estate taxes and progressive income taxes. A flat tax is “what the Bible supports.”

On the same show Barton denounced government spending on welfare. “It’s not the government’s responsibility to take care of the poor and needy,” he said, “it’s the church’s responsibility.”

According to Barton, there are 205 verses in the Bible that instruct the family or church to take care of the poor, but not the government. “The government is told to do only one thing with taking care of the poor and that one thing is to make sure that when the poor come into court they get justice. That’s the only thing government is told….What we’re doing right now is for the first time in America we have ignored what the Bible says, the Bible says you don’t work, you don’t eat.” He went on to say that people “not having to work and getting free money…violates everything the Bible tells us” about dealing with the poor.

It is wrong, Beisner writes, to try to mitigate inequality “through force of government.” Why? “Because God ordained the state to dispense justice, and the church to dispense grace.” According to Beisner, giving someone “unearned” benefits is grace, not justice. People should graciously serve the poor, he writes. “But if care for the needy is made a matter of justice to the needy rather than to God, then grace becomes law. Then, the needy—and those who merely profess to be needy—may claim the benefits of grace as their due by justice.”

In other words, government has no right to tax someone in order to help feed someone else.

That is a widely shared belief on the Religious Right. Speakers at Religious Right conferences like Reed’s June event, and Republican Members of Congress, can be heard justifying cuts in food stamps with an appeal to the Bible passage that David Barton quoted on TBN. That verse, depending on your translation, says something like “he who will not work shall not eat.”

Reps. Kevin Cramer and Rep. Stephen Fincher of Tennessee cited that verse last year. Fincher said, “The role of citizens, of Christianity, of humanity, is to take care of each other, not for Washington to steal from those in the country and give to others in the country.” In equating taxation for social services with theft, Fincher echoes Barton, Beisner, and others. (In context, by the way, the work-to-eat verse referred to early Christians who were so confident of the imminent return of Christ that they quit doing anything.)

Poor people turning to the government, Beisner writes in his anti-social-justice booklet, results in “the stultifying effects of wealth redistribution by the coercive power of the state.” Even worse, he says, “it blinds [poor people] to their deepest need: the grace of God offered in the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Conservative activist Dinesh D’Souza insists that he is the victim of persecution by a left-wing conspiracy emanating from the White House which directed Costco, the New York Times and Google to discriminate against his latest anti-Obama movie and companion book, “America: Imagine the World Without Her.”

As Dave Weigel explained recently, D’Souza has riled up conservative angst by arguing, with no evidence, that Costco pulled his book not because of low sales but as the result of a political vendetta against him, and that Google is making it difficult for potential viewers to find show time information for his film: “Only after the author/campaign finance scofflaw threw several fits about the bias that was preventing America (the country, not the movie) from reading his book did purchasing it become a cause. Up the charts it went, as gullible people took their stands against bias.”

D’Souza took his persecution story to “The Lars Larson Show” yesterday, where he claimed that he isn’t being a crybaby and that he was just asking the question as to whether Google and Costco are part of a political conspiracy against him.

“It is not [accidental]. When you look at both Costco and Google, it is the case that the top executives of both of those companies are very much in bed with Obama. Now, that’s a fact. It doesn’t mean they run their corporation that way and I am sure there are other companies where the CEOs give to Obama or gave to Romney and nevertheless they have customers and they are happy to service them across the political spectrum,” he said.

“I don’t want to seem like a crybaby, I’ve tried to be very restrained with Google and just say, ‘I am puzzled, I am baffled, I am frustrated.’ I am not saying anything more than that but it has been now over two weeks and it is time to get this settled.”

After his lawyers contacted Google and D’Souza hit conservative media outlets with his tale of persecution, a Google representative explained that, shockingly enough, “America” is actually “a common term and appears in many movie titles.”

And at least according to a Google search that I just conducted, the “problem” seems to be resolved…or maybe that is just what Google wants you to think.

A new anti-choice organization meant to be an even more extreme version of the National Right to Life Committee has picked its first president — and they chose someone who embodies the growing schism within the anti-choice movement.

The National Personhood Alliance, which was formed last month by a disaffected former Georgia affiliate of the National Right to Life Committee, announced last week that it had named Molly Smith, president of Cleveland Right to Life, as its first leader.

Cleveland Right to Life caused a stir in the anti-choice movement last year when it vowed to oppose the reelection of Sen. Rob Portman, an abortion rights opponent, because of his support for marriage equality. This prompted National Right to Life president Carol Tobias to send Smith a letter informing her that her chapter could no longer be affiliated with the national group because it “embraced an advocacy agenda that includes issues beyond the right to life.” Smith then fought back, blasting National Right to Life for distancing itself from anti-gay politics in order to keep the support of Sen. Portman.

The most prominent split in the anti-choice movement is about the strategy of allowing rape and incest exemptions to abortion bans — National Right to Life has supported bills that include exemptions, arguing that such bills are better than no legislation at all, while the National Personhood Alliance’s members oppose any hint of compromise in abortion bills.

But Smith’s appointment as the new group’s president highlights the larger divide within the movement. As the anti-choice movement’s leaders get savvier about pushing their message to a wider audience in ways meant to appear more moderate (pushing for “health” regulations that close clinics rather than picketing them, for instance), they are inciting a backlash among those who see anti-choice activism as an integral part of a larger war.

Leaving the issue of LGBT rights alone is a smart strategic decision for leading anti-choice groups, as is the willingness to accept “compromises” like rape exceptions. But by rejecting this kinder, gentler makeover of the movement, the National Personhood Alliance reminds us of what is still at the heart of the opposition to abortion rights.

In an appearance on former congressman Ernest Istook’s radio show “Insights, Issues & Istook,” Gheen said journalists put conservatives “in danger of physical assault or harm” and attempted to issue a “threat of implied violence against you or your family members or your children in school.”

The Americans for Legal Immigration PAC president even warned that minorities may attempt to kill conservatives: “If somebody hangs a hood over your head and gags you and ties you to a light pole in a large city’s minority neighborhood, you’re probably going to get beat up, shot or stabbed.”

Gheen quoted Sarah Palin, who said that she was the victim of a “blood libel” in the wake of a shooting at an event featuring Gabrielle Giffords, to claim that the media persecutes immigration reform critics.

Getting people to show up at physical events has been the most difficult thing on the illegal immigration issue because you’re going to have some liberal at the local paper trying to cost you your job and your community standing by defaming you, what Palin called the ‘blood libel.’ When somebody tries to say you’re a racist, they are not saying this because you are a racist. They are doing this because it’s a control word, it’s a command word, it’s like in the Planet of the Apes movie, it’s like, ‘bow your head.’ Somebody comes out and says, ‘racist,’ most Americans will bow their head and kneel immediately, otherwise they risk complete financial and political ruin. It doesn’t matter if you are a racist or not, they will just stick it in the paper and then there you go.

The other thing about this, if they convince minorities or groups of minorities that you’re a racist, you’re in danger of physical assault or harm. It doesn’t matter whether it is true or not. If somebody hangs a hood over your head and gags you and ties you to a light pole in a large city’s minority neighborhood, you’re probably going to get beat up, shot or stabbed. And so there is the threat of implied violence against you or your family members or your children in school if they just lie about you. The other thing is, all the major networks, CBS, ABC, NBC and now even Fox News are all on the same billionaire, elitist, talking point plan of supporting immigration reform, which translates into changing our laws to accommodate millions of illegal immigrants, which is a form of amnesty. And if that happens, the borders of the United States are gone forever.

Eagle Forum’s Virginia Armstrong, the head of the group’s Court Watch Project, today makes the novel argument that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t protect the rights of LGBT people but in fact requires the government to fight “homosexual conduct” in “every legitimate way possible.”

In an article published on Eagle Forum’s website, Armstrong argues that advances in LGBT equality prove “that America is indeed in the ‘danger zone’ and is in dire need of a massive ‘straightening up process.’”

She then argues that the AIDS epidemic shows that “homosexual conduct is what is harmful to gays and lesbians to the degree that governments are not only constitutionally allowed, but constitutionally required, to fight such conduct in every legitimate way possible.”

All emphasis is Armstrong’s:

HasAmerica bent over so far backwards in our spiritual, moral, and constitutional life that we are in danger of “breaking”? This question is central to our current series of Court Watch Briefings. The question has been precipitated by America’s Culture War and echoes the anguished cry of the Father in the famous musical production, “Fiddler on the Roof,” who felt that revolutionary changes in his world were pushing him to the “breaking point.”

We are proving that America is indeed in the “danger zone” and is in dire need of a massive “straightening up process.” Nothing more clearly demonstrates this fact than the recentsame-sex marriage decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court -Perry v. HollingsworthandWindsor v. U.S.

…

These statistics bring into bolder relief than ever the fatal flaws of Perry/Windsor. HIV and AIDS is a pandemic , far worse than other such health threats which have sent governments and media around the world into a veritable apoplexy, accompanied by demands for the most severe action possible to stem those threats. Yet, federal (and, now, state) judges are demanding constitutional protections for the conduct which is most responsible for the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Furthermore, Judge Vaughn Walker’s “Finding of Fact” that religious opposition to homosexual conduct “harms gays and lesbians” and is constitutionally protected is so incongruent with reality as to be laughable, if it were possible to laugh about such an adjudicative disaster. The reality, of course, is that the exact opposite is true –homosexual conduct is what is harmful to gays and lesbiansto the degree that governments are not only constitutionallyallowed, but constitutionallyrequired, to fight such conduct in every legitimate way possible.This example alone illustrates how upside down is Walker’s blast that “harm to homosexuals” results from religious opposition. This falsehood convertsa particularly pernicious value judgment into an adjudicative fact given great weight in pro-homosexual court decisions.One of the worst blows to reason, morality, and the Judeo-Christian worldview is the speed with which thePerry/Windsorpoison has poured through America’s legal veins…

Flip Benham’s group Operation Save America disrupted the services of the First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans on Sunday while the congregation was honoring a member who had died. The organization framed their action as simply an effort to “present the truth of the Gospel in this synagogue of Satan” as part of their efforts “to defeat the culture of death.”

At the Unitarian Universalist “church” in New Orleans, Deanna Waller, Jay Rogers, Mary Claire, Ken Scott, Russell Hunter, Toby Harman and others presented the truth of the Gospel in this synagogue of Satan. As God would have it, the “church” was filled with students from a “social justice” training school. According to Rev. Flip Benham, OSA National Director, the team presented a “dynamic witness.”

During an open “meditation” time, Deanna shared the Word of the Lord. When the female “pastor” took issue, Deanna reminded her that, “It would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were thrown into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones” (Luke 17:2). In violation of their “sacred tenants” of peace and tolerance, Deanna and others were summarily escorted out of the service.

Other saints stayed and dialoged until the conclusion of the service. It created no small stir. The “social justice” candidates ran to the Christians and asked them many questions. Our brethren gave them the reason for the hope that lies within them and defended the faith. Seeds of truth were sown. may the Lord water them in Jesus’ name.

“The disturbance took place as the congregation was holding a moment of silence for a member of the church who had died the week before, said the Rev. Deanna Vandiver,” the Uptown Messenger reports. “She then invited the protesters to stay if they could join or observe the worship service respectfully, and if not, to take their protest outside the building. The congregation began to sing, and church leaders then began to lead the most vocal protesters outside, though a few chose to stay quietly through the remainder of the service.”

“I think we were an easy target, because we’re literally just a few blocks down the road from where they’re building this clinic,” Vandiver said. “But we are not interested in being terrorized. Freedom of speech does not trump freedom of religion.”

In addition to protesting Planned Parenthood sites, Operation Save America is also holding demonstrations outside the homes of providers. A neighbor to one of those homes — who asked that his name be withheld out of concern that the group would target him — said his family has already endured two sessions of protests, with dozens of people holding signs on the sidewalk near his house featuring graphic images that he has done his best to hide from his young children.

“My kids are scared,” the resident said in an interview Monday afternoon. “It’s all these ugly pictures. They’re talking on the loudspeaker. I try to speak to them civilly, and it’s very difficult to do, because they’re looking for a confrontation.”

On the day of the protest, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu issued a certificate of recognition to Flip Benham and Operation Save America.

A spokesman for the mayor’s office told the Uptown Messenger that “It is routine for the City to provide standard proclamations to visiting non-profits, faith-based organizations and conventions that request them.”

In a posting on Facebook about the mayor’s proclamation, David Benham commented: “Are you serious? This is real?